Beverley McCombs - The Ascott Martyrs

The 1870s saw an explosion of trade unionism across rural England as workers', sick of low pay, appalling conditions and the cost of living, joined new trade unions in their thousands. Many of them quickly went on strike and often one excellent pay rises from the farmers. The epicentre of this trade unionism were the Midland counties of Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, partly because of their proximity to the Warwickshire village of Barford where one of the leading figures of the new unionism, Joseph Arch, lived.

At a recent event in Barford to celebrate the life and struggles of Arch, I was reminded of a often forgotten episode of this struggle that took place nearby in the village of Ascott, near Chipping Norton. I had written about this in my own account of rural struggles, Kill all the Gentlemen, highlighting its importance because it is one of the few occasions where the workers' strikes explicitly involved a group of women. Despite the agricultural unions limiting membership to men, women were actually often agricultural labourers, or workers' in allied trades and certainly were workers. The Ascott Martyrs, as they became known, were a group of sixteen women who were sent to prison for trying to prevent scab labour breaking a strike. Beverley McCombs book on their lives and struggle is a fitting and important tribute to events.

Today the area near Ascott is a relatively affluent part of the Cotswolds, near to the wealthy market town of Chipping Norton. In the early 1870s, while there were pockets of great wealth concentrated in the hands of the landowners and farmers, workers experienced a hard life. Seven of the women who were imprisoned were farm workers, eight gloveresses and one a servant. Assembling gloves was a hard, repetative task often done in the family home or by groups of women visiting each other. As McCombs explains, they "sewed the pieces together by hand, earning between fourpence and fivepence a pair. A good gloveress could make up to three pairs in a day".

This pay did not allow luxury. As one contemporary report quoted by McCombs describes, some of the housing conditiond were appalling:

Imagine a narrow place, like a coal cellar, down which you go two or three steps, no flooring except broken stones, no celiing, no grate, rough walls, a bare ladder leading to the one narrow bedroom about six feet wide, containing two double bedsteads for a man his wife and three young children.

It is no surprise that within a couple of months of forming a union, local workers went on strike. By May 1873, the men had been on strike for four months and the strike was causing significant problems for the landowner. This led to him trying to employ two scab workers. The women decided to act and a newspaper reported:

On Sunday 11th of May [the women] were informed that two strange boys were working on Hambridge's farm, from which the Union men had retired. They discussed the matter and consulted together (the greater part of them being related to a family named Moss), and determined to wait upon the boys to represent to them the manner in which they were injuring their own order.

What happened next depends on which side you were on. As McCombs explains:

The two youths... made statements under oath to prove that they were threatened, molested and obscrtucted from entering their work place. The women, also under aoth, denied these claims, though they did say they had spoken to the youths and asked them not to go to work.

Whatever actually took place, and it seems likely that the scabs were encouraged to exagerate events by the landowner, the women were tried and seven women considered leaders were give ten days with hard labour, the remainder seven days with hard labour. Considering that two of the women had babies in arms, this was vicious and cruel sentancing by the two clergy acting as magistrates. They were ignorant of the law and in fact the outrage at the sentences and the riot that took place afterwards caused a brief national scandal, and McCombs suggests, an eventual reform of the law.

The riot was significant and demonstrated the outrage, some 1000 people protested outside the Chipping Norton police station were the women were awaiting transfer to prison. As McCombs says, "The crowd shouted, 'Fetch the women!', 'Stick to the union!', 'Cheers for the women!' and 'Cheers for the union!', along with further threats that they would pull down the police station unless the women were freed." Sadly this latter did not take place and the women were hauled off to hard labour.

McCombs details conditions - which were awful - and the longer time impact of the sentences on the women. Their release, by contrast, was marked by two celebratory events, parades and rallies as the two groups of women came home. In his autobiography Joseph Arch says that the women were given a silk dress in union colours, and £5 each. He also notes that £80 was raised for their support, £5 of which came in pennies - indicating that many poor people gave. McCombs discusses a long standing belief that Queen Victoria herself gave a dress to the women, though it seems unlikely to be true.

McCombs book has its roots in her own investigations of family history, and the book finishes with detailed individual accounts of each women, their family relations (many were related to each other as the newspaper suggested) and what happened to them. Many of the women, like many other agricultural workers in the union movement, emigrated to North America or New Zealand. Some of them had lives cut short by the conditions they had experienced, including in prison. Others seemed to live long and happier lives. Some of them lived into relatively modern times being young when the strike took place. Reading McCombs summary of their subsequent lives, I was struck again by how the experience of struggle is often transformative and life changing. Fanny Honeybone, who was sixteen when she tried to stop the scabs breaking the strike, and was sent to prison for 10 days with hard labour, lived until 1939. She had fourteen children, five of whom died very young and lived her whole life in the local area. In 1928 she remembered the strike very fondly, and her quote stands testament to the struggle and the role of women in these strikes, which is all too often ignored and forgotten:

During the strike... the farmer, had sent for two men to finish his pea hoeing, and the women, including myself, went up the Ascott-under-Wychwood road to stop them. There was something of the idea of fun in what we did - certainly no intention to harm them. I got ten days, second division, in Oxford Gaol. I remember the coaches which met us and the demonstration afterwards in the Town Hall at Chipping Noron. Those were stirring times and it gives me a thrill of pleasure to remember them.

Beverley McCombs short book is a fitting and detailed tribute to these women. It also raises the question about whether there were other such events involving women workers, that have been neglected by the union movement. As she points out, Arch himself believed "Wives must be at home" and there ought to be a family wage paid to their husbands. His union thought that women workers' would drive down men's wages. Luckily this attitude is long gone from the British labour movement, but it was a significant issue in the 1870s and likely undermined the strength of the strikes. Did other women agricultural labourers come out with their men? 

The book will be an important source for family historians (I myself found at least one family connection!) and those interested in the history of women's struggle and radicalism in the countryside. You can order it from the Ascott Martyrs'  website.

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Ilan Pappe - Ten Myths About Israel

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's work has been some of the most consistent in explaining the origins of the Israeli state and its war on the Palestinians. The recent military assault on Gaza by Israel, following the October 7th attacks by Hamas, prompted me to read Ten Myths About Israel. This is one of Pappe's most well known and popular works and one that is currently available for free download from publisher Verso's website. It is a very readable and accessible book that offers a straightforward explanation of Israel's history and the debates around Palestinian resistance to occupation.

Pappe begins with some historical myths. He explains that Palestine was not an "empty land", rather it was a "rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean world that in the nineteenth century underwent processes of modernization and nationalisation. It was not a desert waiting to come into bloom; it was a pastoral country on the verge of enterting the twentieth century as a modern society... Its colonization by the Zionist movement turned this process into a disaster for the majority of the native people living there."

The argument that Palestine was empty before colonisation is one that is remarkably similar to the descriptions of North America, Australia and New Zealand as empty spaces, and the legal concept of "Terra nullius" to argue that there were no claims on land in Australia by the indigneous people. It is one reason why Pappe argues that Israel is a Settler Colonial state. 

The question of "what Zionism is" is a key theme of the book. Pappe makes it very clear that Zionism is not the same as Judaism, rather Zionism began in a particular historical context: "only one, inessential, expression of Jewish cultural life" at its birth. Pappe's history of Zionism is essential reading - he shows how it arose out of the "Jewish enlightenment movement" but was frequently critiqued by Jewish people themselves, particularly on the left. "Socialists and Orthodox Jews began to voice their criticisms of Zionism only in the 1890s, when Zionism became a more recognised political force very late in the decade." It was the "diligent" work of Theodore Herzl who repeatedly put the argument for a "modern Jewish state in Palestine" which began to get traction among Western political leaders, who saw in it a way of strengthening their own imperalist power in the Middle East. 

A great strength of the book is that Pappe explores the historical and political context, but he does not ignore religious debate, particularly about whether the Bible contains a case for a Jewish state in Palstine. He writes:

The final reason offered for the ZIonist reclamation of the HOly Land as determined by the Bible, was the need of Jews around the world to find a safe haven, especially after the Holocaust. However, even if this as true, it might have bee possible to find a solution that was not restricted to the biblical map and that did not dispossess the Palestinians. This position was voiced by quite a few well-known personalitiies, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. These commentators tried to asuggest that the Palestinians should be asked to provide a safe haven for persecuted Jews alongside the native population, not in place of it. But the Zionist movement regarded such proposals as heresy.

The importance of Pappe's work is the place contemporary events in a historical context. As Pappe himself writes, and apologies for another extended quote, but hearing his arguments is important:

As long as the full implications of Israel's past and present ethnic cleansing policies are not recognised and tackled by the international community, there will be no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ignoring the issue of the Palestinian refugees will repeatedly undermine any attempt to reconcile the two conflicting parties. This is why it is so important to recognise the 1948 events as an ethnic cleansing operation, so as to ensure that a political solution will not evade the root of the conflict; namely, the expulsion of the Palestinians. Such evasions in the past are the main reason for the collapse of all previous peace accords.

The conclusion of Pappe's book, which argues that Israel is a Settler Colonial state is important. He makes no easy promises about how conflict can be avoided. But he does offer hope:

This barbarization of human relations in the Middle East can only be stopped by the poeple of the region themselves. However, they should be aided by the outside world. Together the region should return to its not so distant past, when th eguiding principle was "live and let live." No serious discussion about ending human rights abuses in the region as a whole can bypass a conversation abotu the 100 years of human rights abuses in Palestine.... Any discussion of the abuse of the Palestinians' human rights needs to include an understanding of the inevitable outcome of settler colonial projects such as Zionism. The Jewish settlers are now an organic and integral part of the land. They cannot, and will not, be removed. They should be part of the future, but not on the basis of the constant oppression and dispossession of the local Palestinians.

How we get to this future is not explored by Pappe in this work, but his reference to the "people of the region" offers us a glimpse. I would argue that it is the power of the working class, particularly the mass working class of Egypt that offers the strength to overturn social relations in the region and break the power of Imperialism. I don't know whether Pappe would agree with that specific argument. However his Ten Myths About Israel is an important, and very accessible contribution to understanding the history of Palestine and Israel. Readers will learn a great deal that puts current tragic events in context. 

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Duncan Stone - Different Class: The untold story of English cricket

Early this year, in June 2023, a long awaited, independent report into "Equity in Cricket" was published. The report was damning, saying that English cricket was not "for everyone", and prompted the chair of English cricket to say "This report makes clear that historic structures and systems have failed to prevent discrimination, and highlights the pain and exclusion this has caused." The report exploded like a bombshell during the Second Test of the summer's Ashes series. But by the end of the series it had all but disappeared from the headlines.

Anyone who has spent anytime following cricket in England will know that the sport is riddled with racism, misogyny and hostility to change. It has a strange obsession with its own history, and despite it being very much a sport liked, played and followed by thousands, there is a tendency for it only to be thought of in terms of test matches, national games and county cricket.

As a lifetime cricket fan and supporter of the "Anyone but England" position, I thought it time to delve deeper into the history of the game. Duncan Stone's Different Class seemed the ideal book to explore the real history of the game and try to understand how we have ended up with a national game that is so resistant to change. Stone shows how modern cricket evolved from a mass sport, that involved hundreds of thousands of players and supporters. 

Broadcasters, politicians and the people in charge of the contemporary game would have us believe its origins lie in gentile matches between village teams of vicars and blacksmiths, played purely for the love of the sport. In reality much of the mass participatory roots of the game lie in the huge profits to be made from gambling. It was precisely this mass appeal that meant the establishment saw in cricket something else. By the end of the nineteenth century,

Cricket's growing significance extended beyond what happened at the wicket. Thomas Martineau, the Mayor of Birmingham clarified this wider importance... in 1884: cricket, he argued, now formed "part of a larger question exercising the minds of many wise people in England... namely, the question of keeping up the strength of nation".

As Stone continues, it was

cricket, more than any other sport, that came to define the spiritual (or moral) health of the English. If the overwhelming mass of ordinary cricketers and administrators had done the most to make cricket the national game, the "spirit" of English cricket would be shaped by a mere handful of gentlemen amateurs who had, invariably, attended one of the nation's famous public schools.

A running theme through Stone's book, and indeed the history of English cricket, is the way that the administrators of the national game hated and disliked the cricket from below epitomised by countless different leagues and groups of teams. One cricket writer, Alec Waugh, worried in the Cricketer in 1922 that cricket "is no longer entertained for a few. It has become a part of the national life, and probably, if the Bolsheviks get their way with her, it will be nationalised with the cinema and the theatre and Association Football." Chance would be a fine thing.

Such ludicrous musings on the part of Waugh reflected a genuine fear of sport from below, and the idea that ordinary players and supporters could enjoy and manage their own game. Much of Stone's book explores how the various leagues evolved and existed, demonstrating an amazing life that is hidden from official histories that focus on specific matches, players and the national game.

The official focus on games for the sake of games demonstrated an "increasing rejection of competitive cricket" which was seen as working class, radical and unsporting. The country's industrial north was associated with competitive professional leagues and the south, alleged to be about sportsmanship and playing the game. Stone's detailed accounts shows that this was far from true, but the administrators in London were able to shape a narrative that writes out the working class, ordinary person's game from history. As Stone summaries:

While working-class cricketers in the Home Countries continued to play against their neighbours in local leagues, clubs dominated by the region's middle class coveted visits from elite metropolitan clubs. Regional and local rivalries did not strictly disappear, but one's social class or education rather than place or community, now defined sporting rivalries where the middle class dominated. Over time, this made it increasingly difficult to determine which clubs were the best in playing terms, as a club's status hinged upon their facilities, the social statues of its players and those it played against. 

Such was the position in the run up to the Second World War, and it is one that Stone argues came to be defended and extended after the interregnum caused by the conflict. It also continues to define the game today. Let's spell out Stone's argument. Essentially he says that class interests came to dominate the game, though their wealth and power. 

The warring factions in club cricket's cold war were split between those who wished to preserve a non-competitive form of the game where elite clubs got to choose who they mixed with, and those who wanted to see the introduction of meritocratic leagues that would encourage youth, raise standards and public interest.

Despite the continued love of the game, mass participation and dynamic leagues and local clubs, this situation essentially continues today. The purse strings repeatedly fail to open for working class communities, whose school children have lost their playing fields and rarely have access to the equipment needed to play cricket. Much vaunted attempts to get more non-white players, women and so on into the sport have repeatedly failed and the national game (of both men and women) remains dominated by individuals from middle and upper class backgrounds. The playing fields of Eton, and its like, continue to dominate the game.

The recent success of the English women's team demonstrates the appetite for the watching public for cricket. But it remains a game that is frequently out of the reach of ordinary people. Stone argues that the English Cricket Board continues to ensure that cricket was "run in the interests of a minority of subscribers". 

For those who enjoy cricket it is a depressing situation. Though, as Stone demonstrates, there is a lot of cricket out there, though not necessarily in the public view. Stone's book is a powerful polemic that ought to be widely read. It is a history that has very little anecdotes from extraordinary games, few tales of eccentric and talented players and very little of the "leather on willow" beloved of the usual cricket history. It won't be widely read in Lords or in the members' pavilion at Edgbaston where I spent a few depressing years. But it is all the better for that. While the reader may struggle with the detail of the ins and outs of various leagues, it is worth persevering. As Stone says, the future of the game as a sport with "broad appeal" will very much depend on it coming to "reflect the nation that is England today". 

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Mark L Thomas, Jessica Walsh & Charlie Kimber - The Revival of Resistance: The 2022-3 strikes and the battles still to come

In the year to June 2023 Britain saw around 4.1 million strike days. Traditionally these days are described by the media and the government as "lost", but for the trade unionists taking them, and the socialist movement these days represented a revival of the workers movement. This represented the highest level of strike action since the 1980s and a chance for trade unionists to turn back decades of pay freezes, attacks on workers' conditions and austerity. That year saw impressive strikes and pickets lines and huge demonstrations. Like many other socialists engaged in active solidarity I visited more pickets in this year than I had in my previous three decades of activism. The vast majority of those picket lines were exciting, inspiring and big - with a new young generation of workers engaged in strikes, many for the first time.

But the size of the strikes and the celebratory mood on them sometimes hide a problem. In few of the strikes was there a serious strategy to win, and too many disputes have ended with deals that are best described as "poor". With inflation in the UK hitting record levels, many groups of workers settled for deals that were less than inflation and certainly, as this book argues, below what could have been won.

The authors of this book are all leading members of the British Socialist Workers' Party. Their short book is an attempt to analyse the strikes and offer "a sharp challenge to the union bureaucracy and lays out a strategy for the way forward". Thus the book is more than an analysis of the moment, but an attempt to learn lessons and develop workers' struggle. The authors identify a number of problems with the struggle as it stands. The first is the episodic nature of the strikes with unions calling strikes that lasted one or two, sometimes a few days. The second is a failure to coordinate - a reluctance on behalf of the union leadership to strike together with other unions. When this did happen, such as the days that saw the Civil Service union PCS strike with the teachers in the NEU - the joint events, such as the demonstration in Manchester that I was part of, were joyous celebrations of workers' power.

The authors write:

A central less from these experiences is that resisting poor deals is connected to the argument for escalation, which is a break from the limited pressure of episodic strikes. The question of how more can be won, how real victories can be best achieved needs to be raised constantly. This in turn need s to be combined with rebuilding activist networks that understand they cannot rely on the trade union leaderships to fight effectively and consistently.

This critical position on the trade union leadership is often at odds with the initial experience of many strikers. As the authors point out:

For more than 30 years, the near universal experience of working class activists, even the most militant, has been one of relying on and operating within a framework set from above - by the trade union bureaucracy, and acting independently of them has been a rare exception. So it is not surprising that many activists entered the recent strikes with illusions both about the scale of the confrontation needed to achieve decisive victories... but also, and correspondingly the scale of the challenge with their own officials that this would require.

The authors draw on the SWP's analysis, first developed by Tony Cliff, that argues that the trade union apparatus, forms a "separate social layer with its own set of interests distinct from workers on the one hand and the bosses who oversee and enforce their exploitation on the other". The bureaucrats and union leaders have a material interest in maintaining their position and not fighting too hard - not least their high salaries, as a rather shocking and useful salary table in this book shows. 

The strikes could, and should, win more - and the barrier is the inherent conservatism of the trade union bureaucracy. The counter to this is the development of rank and file organisation that can lead the struggle from below, in defiance of the leadership if and when needed. The authors demonstrate this with historical accounts and several examples from contemporary struggles in Britain. But most excitingly there is a really inspiring chapter on the movement in France that is on a much bigger scale than in Britain. There the movement "shook" the country and demonstrated the potential to win so much more. There are plenty of useful lessons for British trade unions. The inclusion of this material and linking it to the British struggle is a real strength of the book. 

The authors' caution though. The potential for developing these movements is not the immediate victory of socialism, but rather a process by which

workers would start to see alternative sources of power and decision-making that could destroy and replace the capitalist state. Everything that diverts and delays that process is fatal. It creates opening s for the bureaucrats to squeeze life from the struggle.

In conclusion then the authors are hopeful that we can build on the movements of 2022/3 to win real change. But there is a struggle - we need a bigger, stronger rank and file within the trade unions and a bigger revolutionary socialist movement. With these tools the movement can grow and expand its horizons. There has never been a greater need for workers' victory and this short, but inspiring and accessible book should be read by every worker who is sick of the system and wants to fight back.

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Chinua Achebe - An Image of Africa

This short book is actually a collection of two essays by China Achebe, the author of the superb novel Things Fall Apart - the classic exploration of the impact of colonialism on Africa. In this theme, the first essay is a brilliant study by Achebe of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Conrad's book is, as Achebe points out, frequently studied and offered as a study of liberalism and imperialism. It is supposed to highlight the reality of colonial rule on Africa, through the mindset of its narrator. As such Conrad is let off the hook, and allowed to be the voice of consciousness for the reader. This, argues, Achebe is nonsense, because Conrad is "a bloody racist" and Heart of Darkness is a book which

parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question.

Achebe continues to preempt those who argue that it is not Conrad's voice, but his characters, by pointing out:

But if Conrad's intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator, his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint, clearly and adequately, at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad's power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary.

Achebe points out that Conrad might have seen the consequences of imperialism, "but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth". This is, of course, because Conrad shared those beliefs and racist attitudes - the Image of Africa that Conrad uses, "did not originate" with him, it is the "dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination" and Conrad simply "brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it". While liberal Europeans might decry this characterisation of Conrad's racism in Heart of Darkness, Achebe notes that "victims of racism" have no such problems identifying the racism at the heart of the novel.

The second essay, The Trouble with Nigeria, seems at first to be a lot less accessible to a reader in the 21st century as it deals with the political and economic issues of post-colonial Nigeria. Achebe illustrates this through discussions of corruption, waste, inefficiency and lack of democracy in Nigeria in the 1970s. He focuses on local questions such as Tribalism, as well as wider issues common to many countries such as inequality. It is brilliantly, and fluidly written - as witnessed by Achebe's specific use of the traffic problem in Nigeria as a metaphor, albeit a concrete one, for the country's problems. How can, Achebe asks, a country like Nigeria - with its wealth of natural resources, people and experience - become a global power? While the book is rooted in its time and place, the questions are eternal - at least under capitalism. And this, is one of the shortcomings of an otherwise interesting essay. Achebe highlights many problems, and notes particularly the immense inequality in Nigeria which has seen a new Black African ruling class become supremely wealthy. The starting point for Achebe seems to be a collective national interest - with the different class interests of its population - farmers, workers and capitalists - placed in second place. The force to change this, is one that has hitherto been silent and includes Achebe himself - Nigeria's intellectuals. 

While Achebe skewers the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the country's politicians, he is curiously naive when it comes to the origins of Nigeria's troubles. These he sees as caused by the mindsets left behind by colonialism, which thus requires intellectuals to drive change. He fails to see Nigeria's problems as originating in the nature of  capitalism - a system that cannot ever be democratic or just, even when run by a black ruling class. It will take a revolutionary change to fully break free of the chains of international and national capital that continue to hold Africa's development back. Deep down Achebe perhaps knows this, as with his celebration of the black, Muslim socialist radical Aminu Kano, at the end of the book. 

I found both these essays highly stimulating politically. But they also demonstrate a powerful polemical talent - these are books that challenge liberal politics and viewpoints, and show that the legacy of European colonialism goes much deeper than many would admit, which is why this short book deserves a read.

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Janos Bak (ed) - The German Peasant War of 1525

This book originated as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies marking the 450th anniversary of the German Peasant War of 1525. This edition was republished in 2013 and, despite the expense, remains an important collection of essays offering insight into 1525. Many of the authors were outstanding figures in historical studies of the period, and their work repays reading.

In his introduction to the book, František Graus notes the importance of the 1525 rebellion as an example of a late medieval rebellion in response to the "agrarian crisis". A feature of these later revolts was that the peasantry began to understand that their "servile status was not... the result of 'divine will'," which meant the peasants' demands went "beyond fighting for the special grievances of their particular communities and start a struggle for a new order established according to God's will and justice". 

Such demands are, of course, reflected in the famous "Twelve Articles" that were produced during the rebellion, which as Henry J. Cohn argues in his piece on the Peasants of Swabia, would have seen a "fundamental shift in economic power and social status in favour of the lower orders and at the expense of the lords" had they been won. But Cohn notes the way these, and similar, demands ran through the German Peasantry. Hundreds of local grievances were "generalised" as the Twelve Articles, but they were demanded from hundreds of local villages assemblies and meetings. The process by which these written demands were generated is shown in some of the documents that Cohn translates for this collection - reports that show the gathering of peasants in secret, their networking and their election of leaflets. Reading these brings a medieval peasant revolt to life, showing the process that took place and perhaps reminding one of how activists continue to organise today below the radar of management and oppressive regimes. These original documents are real gems, but as Cohn argues the problem was that these natural networks of rebellious peasants did not break out into the sort of organisation that could seriously win their demands:

The sense of class solidarity among peasants which these and similar documents exhibited did not usually extend beyond the province in which they originated; nor did peasant unity and organisation prove sufficient in the end to overcome the superior military resources and the greater degree of cooperation which prevailed among the members of the Swabian League and other German rulers.

Adolf Laube provides a fascinating study of "precursor" revolts to 1525, again arguing that with the start of the 16th century the "antifeudal movement became revolutionary". Peter Blickle's article on the background to the Twelve Articles shows how this manifested itself through specific demands. He emphasises how "revolutionary" demands like the abolition of serfdom were extremely popular and that "90 percent of peasants whose complaints are known to us singled it out", and he concludes with the revolutionary nature of the demands:

The Twelve Articles indicate a fundamental crisis in the system of reference between peasant and lord. Feudalism of this mould became obviously petrified, unresponsive, rigid; in brief, it was unable to solve the problems otherwise than at the expense of the peasants. The peasants believed that the Twelve Articles might at least defuse this crisis. They even expected to overcome feudalism with the help of the Gospel and Divine Justice, which promised them an entirely open, fresh start for building a new society and authority.

In marking the anniversary of the revolt in 1975/6 the Journal of Peasant Studies could not ignore two other aspects of the epoch. The first was the extensive debate that had taken place about the nature of the Peasants War, and its context. This was shaped fundamentally by the existence of the two German nations. In East Germany, in the Soviet sphere of influence and ideologically (if not socially and economically) committed to a "Communism" allegedly standing in the tradition of Marx and Engels, the understanding of 1525 was fundamentally shaped by a dogmatic adherence to the outline presented by Engels in his own work. Here, the idea that 1525 was an "early" bourgeois revolution dominated historiography. In the West, historians tended to completely dismiss this approach. Several essays are centred on this discussion and while the context is the antagonistic relationships between West and East, reading them today offers some insights. East German historian Ernst Engelberg's article is a bad-tempered and dogmatic response to criticism. Gunter Vogler's on the other hand is a more nuanced response to criticisms of a Marxist approach.

A second aspect to the studies are the exploration of how peasant revolts of the 20th century compared to those of the 16th century. Unfortunately I found these less useful, as they had dated a great deal, though the article exploring parallels between the driving forces of 1525, as explored by Engels, and "capitalist" developments in Iran was definitely interesting, showing how "land reform" was pushing revolt. These are probably articles for the more specialist historian, though they do demonstrate that Engels' approach to 1525 retains lasting value. The collection itself remains a insightful and indispensible book for those writing histories for the 500th anniversary.

Related Reviews

Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
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Ian Angus - The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism

In his latest book, Ian Angus answers a question that apologists for the capitalist system would like to pretend does not exist. How is it that humans came to live in a world were a tiny minority own and control huge amounts of wealth, and the vast majority of us have to work for them? Angus writes that "even sharp critics of injustice and inequality rarely question the division between owners and workers, employers and employees". Yet almost every aspect of our world is defined by such inequality. About 50 percent of England is owned by one percent of the population. A staggering inequality for a country supposedly defined by its "green and pleasant land". Indeed it is England were Angus' history is mostly focused, for here it was that the process went "furthest" according to Marx. But the transformation of society that saw the total destruction of "the traditional economy" was neither automatic nor benign. Rather:

wage-labour has only become universal in the past few hundred years - and the change was forced on us by 'the most merciless barbarism, and under the stimulus of the most infamous, the most sordid, the most petty and the most odious of passions'.

The quote here comes from Marx, and Angus skilfully uses Marx's theoretical framework to explore the development of capitalism's system of unrestrained accumulation based on exploitation. Marx was well aware that pre-capitalist society took a myriad of different forms, and Angus shows how England (and indeed the British Isles in general) saw a number of different ways of organising agricultural production. The peasantry, under the respective lords, farmed land in ways that were much more communal and depended, in significant part, on the use of communal land. These commons were used according to democratic and egalitarian principles, sharing fields and carefully managing access to essential resources.

The developing capitalist interests however saw the commons as a barrier to further profit. The destruction of the commons, the key theme of this book, took place not out of individual malice, but out of the logic of capital. The need, by the capitalists to expand into every available space and to transform the very world into their own image. Land, animals, wood, forests and space itself was converted into a commodity that could be bought and sold. Fields were engrossed, land was enclosed, commons were privatised. The peasants who lived from the land, were expelled or turned into wage labourers - their old traditions and histories erased. As Angus says, "The twin transformations of original expropriation - stolen land becoming capital and landless producers becoming wage workers - were well underway". These people became a new social group:

A new class of wage-labourers was born in England when 'great masses of men [were] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and right-less proletarians.'

The quote is, again, from Marx, whose book Capital is filled with rage at what happened to the peasantry. Angus continues by highlighting the sweep of this process:

It was sudden for those who lost their land, but the social transformation took centuries. In the early 1700s, two hundred years after Thomas More condemned enclosures and depopulation in Utopia, about a third of England and almost all of Scotland was still unenclosed, and most people still lived and worked on the land. it took another great wave of assaults on commons and commoners, after 1750, to complete the transition to industrial capitalism... Looking back, that transition appears inevitable but it did not seem so to commoners at the time... some argued eloquently for a commons-based alternative to both feudalism and capitalism.

Contrary to what some followers of Marx tell us, he did not believe that this process was inevitable or indeed desirable. Marx took inspiration from contemporary movements to protect the commons in his own time, but he was also aware of historic struggles. A great strength of Angus' book is his celebration of these forgotten struggles. One key event is Kett's Rebellion of 1549, about which I have written elsewhere. But Angus also notes other struggles, such as the great battles between poachers and gamekeepers - representing resistance to the idea that game should be a commodity, private property for the sole use of the local landowner. A significant chapter also looks at the work of Gerrard Winstanley whose writings during the English Revolution raised the possibility of a new way of ordering society - though interestingly Angus frames' Winstanley's vision not as a future Utopia, but as a transitional society to it.

Angus' conclusions about the laws introduced to protect private property make an important point:

The very existence of the Bloody Code refutes the common claim that capitalism triumphed because it better reflected the dictates of human nature than previous social orders. The poor were not easily reconciled to a system that expelled them from the land. England's ruling class tried to terrorise them into submission.

This terror and the process of destruction of the commons was not limited to England. Angus demonstrates how the colonial project for English capitalism arose directly from the processes begun in the English countryside. The slave trade, the destruction of commons in the Americas, Africa and Asia were part of a process that subverted the world into the interests of English capital. These sections are among the book's most insightful and moving, dealing as they do with the destruction of entire peoples and their worlds. 

Angus also gives several important theoretical insights. He notes, for instance, how apologists for capitalism can argue that the process was painful and violent, but it was necessary. They suggest that enclosure was important because it was only in this way that crop yields could rise to the levels needed to support industrial capitalism. Angus shows the wealth of evidence that this is incorrect and that yields were not significantly improved. But he also makes an important point that peasants themselves were innovative and clever - far from the dumb backward looking yokels of legend. Common field farming was not "inherently conservative" it was actually dynamic and incredibly successful. But such propaganda was important to the landowning class who wanted theoretical justification for their actions. It is notable that similar points are frequently made today. We are told that large scale industrial farming is the only way to feed the world. But such farming invariably has lower yields, is more polluting and highly vulnerable to environmental disaster. Then, as now, the "claim that peasants resisted improved methods reflects anti-peasant prejudice, not the real activity of working farmers".

The skilful linking of historical processes to contemporary political and ecological struggles is a great strength of Angus' book. This is not specifically a work of history, but rather a framing of the current ecological crisis within the wider historic development of capitalism and the destruction of the commons. For Angus it is capitalism's transformation of the commons that is emblematic of the system's method of operation. But looking backward can only tell us so much, the alternative has to be a new way of organising society based on the creation of a new society with the idea of common, democratic ownership at its heart. As Angus writes, "Today's movements of the oppressed and dispossessed to steal back the commons offer real hope that capitalism's five-century war against the commons can be defeated and reversed in our time." It is an inspiring vision and Ian Angus' War Against the Commons is a brilliant account that ought to be read by every activist who wants to see an end to capitalism and "another world".

I am looking forward to speaking with Ian Angus via Zoom for the London launch of The War Against the Commons at Marxism 2023. More information on the whole event here.

Related Reviews

Angus - A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism
Angus - Facing the Anthropocene
Angus & Butler - Too Many People? Population, Immigration & the Environmental Crisis

Yerby - The English Revolution and the Roots of Environmental Change
Wood - The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England
Wood - Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England
Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
Thompson - Customs in Common
Linebaugh - Stop Thief!
Sharpe - In Contempt of All Authority
Hill - Liberty Against the Law

Alex Callinicos - The New Age of Catastrophe

The title of Alex Callinicos' book The New Age of Catastrophe echoes Eric Hobsbawm who described the years between 1914 to 1950, containing as they did two world wars, economic crisis and the Holocaust, as the "Age of Catastrophe". Callinicos argues that we are in a comparable period, which confronts us "with a crisis of civilisation" where "the forms of living that were made possible by the development of industrial capitalism... and that became increasingly generalised in the twentieth century are no longer viable". In fact they are "hurtling us towards societal collapse."

This capitalist drive towards collapse has a number of different manifestations - economic, imperialist, environmental and disease - each of which is rooted in the system and all of them linked together. Indeed, what makes Callinicos' book so useful is that he shows how these apparently singular disasters are woven into the fabric of the system, and simultaneously how the nature of the system itself amplifies and extenuates the disaster. For instance, writing about Covid, Callinicos says:

The pandemic thus has seen a brutal struggle between life and profits. So the chances of dying from a virus that emerged in the context of the globalisation of industrial capitalism are shaped by the prevailing class structures. Capitalism features on both sides of the equation. Humankind stands before the rest of nature fractured by social antagonism. And, as we have seen in the grossly unequal allocation of vaccines, this is even more true on a global scale than it is within individual societies.

Callinicos deploys this analysis in three excellent sections looking at the economic, military and environmental crises. In these he draws on a lifetime of Marxist theoretical work and revolutionary activity, and demonstrates an enviable ability to summarise the subjects. The chapter on environmental crises focuses mostly on climate change, and Callinicos draws on the theoretical work of writers like John Bellamy Foster, Mike Davis and Andreas Malm. But he shows how this crisis, arising out of the specific development of capitalism develops along similar lines to that of the Covid example above. In locating the climate crisis as a systemic one Callinicos also makes it clear that solutions are, essentially non-solutions if they do not challenge the system that drives the problem. His conclusion is thus that a strategy to deal with climate change that relies on market mechanisms or technological deployment is "purest folly". This conclusion is echoed by a point he makes about Covid:

By offering an individualised solution, the vaccination programmes shift our attention from the need to transform our relationship with nature and to invest in better transport and healthcare; and in this way, paradoxically, they feed the anti-vax campaigns of the far right.

Mention here of the far right brings me to another key insight of The New Age of Catastrophe - Callinicos' analysis of the fascist and far-right movements. These sections are incredibly insightful, and develop an excellent earlier article on the global far right. But it is the section on the United States that I found most illuminating (and frightening). Here Callinicos describes a far-right which has largely been successful in "directing the anger generated by the ills of the neoliberal era, at least in certain sections of the population... onto a cosmopolitan elite and... onto migrants and refugees." He shows how fascist movements have grown within and from right populist movements. Often, as in the case of the United States with Trump, or Brazil with Bolsanaro, there is a interaction between the fascists movements and the populist leaderships. In the United States this has gone furthest, with the storming of the Capitol being emblematic of this (though there was a similar event in Brazil recently, presumably after the book had gone to print). Perhaps controversially, Callinicos argues that the United States is the "weak link" where fundamental social, economic and political fractures have created a cauldron for the growth of far-right policies and were most of the left has become subordinate to the Democratic Party machine. It is, Callinicos argues, possible to imagine a "violent implosion" of US society.

In the face of these threats, and the very real way that war, climate change and economic crisis will heighten the possibility of social crisis, Callinicos argues a revolutionary strategy. Here he puts a classical Marxist position of the working class as the agent of revolutionary change, and the potential for the creation out of this of a society based on the common ownership of the means of production, where production itself is planned through mass participatory democracy. But Callinicos argues this through a discussion of two "terrains of struggle" that do not immediately call to mind the organised working class - gender and race. Here he says that the contestations over these could "contribute to the formation of a new working-class subject of emancipation". These sections are excellent, and Callinicos provides an excellent summary of the movements for trans rights, Black Lives Matter and women's rights. He concludes, in a section worth quoting at length, that the convergence between movements against oppression and exploitation could lead to a "new kind of workers movement" which goes beyond narrow economic issues:

Given its nature in the twenty-first century, the working class would have to give the different oppressions that weigh down on people - especially those arising from gender, 'race', sexual orientation, and disability - a strategic importance that they have lacked in the past... This would be not merely a moral stand but a matter of self-interest, of practical necessity. This necessity is underlined by the way in which the development of globalised production networks creates an interdependence between workers in the South and in the North... In unexpected ways, the world working class, which Marx and Engels address at the end of the Communist Manifesto, could thus begin to emerge as a collective agent in this age of catastrophe.

It is a hopeful outlook as it does not offer readers any illusion that the system will fix itself, or that far-right movements will simply collapse. Instead Callinicos shows how existing movements can become the part of the revolutionary process that might create a new socialist society. But at the same time, Callinicos makes it clear - there are no shortcuts to building those movements, and there are perils and divisions. Readers however will find The New Age of Catastrophe an indispensable aid to navigate the terrain of reaction and revolution. I highly recommend it.

Related Reviews

Callinicos - An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy
Callinicos - Making History
Callinicos and Simons: The Great Strike: The Miners' Strike of 1984-5 and its Lessons
McGarr & Callinicos - Marxism and the Great French Revolution
Callinicos, Kouvelakis, Pradella (eds) - Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism

Chad E. Pearson - Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen & Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century

In Summer 1901 some 100 men broke into the homes of thirteen trade unionists in the city of Tampa, Florida in the United States. The union activists were mostly Black and of Cuban and Italian heritage. They were put onto a boat and taken to an island off Honduras were they were marooned. The activists were part of a major cigar workers' strike - a key industry in Tampa - which had successfully closed down production. The kidnapping was designed to undermine the strike, break union organisation and give the initiative back to the bosses. In this it was successful. The 100 anti-union activists were marshalled together by a conglomeration of Tampa's "elite" - business owners and politicians who were "labor's most passionate enemies".

Reading Chad E. Pearson's book Capital's Terrorists it is hard not to be shocked by the stories of repression he records. The Tampa kidnapping of 1901 is unusual because it did not lead to the murder or injury of workers or their union organisers. There are many other tragic examples of lynching, shooting, torture and imprisonment however through the period covered. Pearson highlights the uniqueness of this violence with comparable economies:

Nationally, between 1872 and 1914, anti-labor union forces killed between 500 and 800 workers in direct conflicts. This amount is considerably larger than the number of strike-related deaths in other countries during this period. In Germany... the number of protesters killed during the same period was sixteen. In France... nineteen laborers were killed between 1906 and 1909.

This violence was a consequence of the history of the United States. The kidnapping of Tampa's union activists was inspired by the forced displacement of Florida's Native American population. Systematic and murderous violence against black workers' flowed directly from the politics and organisation of the bosses during the Slavery and Reconstruction eras. The violence that had founded the United States became part of the DNA of class relations. This is not to say that other countries "elites" did not commit murder or kidnapping. The British state's treatment of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the protesters at Peterloo or other rebels gives the lie to that. The point that Pearson makes is that the scale and nature of the violence in the US used against workers' was unprecedented.

W. E. B. Du Bois said that the decade after Reconstruction saw the "counter-revolution of property", a period when Pearson tells us:

Thanks partially to elites' vigilantism, which involved various forms of coercion, intimidation and violence meant to keep African Americans on worksites, and away from polling booths, schools and political formations - the 1880s saw major increase in the production of corn, cotton, rice and sugar. Klansmen and other vigilantes helps to ensure that the South's coercive labor regimes produced enough commodities to meet global demand.

The employers' organisations which drove such counter-labour activities saw their actions as maintaining their power, influence and the status quo - and ensuring huge profits. As such paramilitary groups like the KKK should be understood was more than just racist organisations. They were "multilocational and decentralized association[s] that used terrorism to... promote the interests of society's most privileged members. In short, vigilante groups like the Klan served the class interests of those at the top of society". These groups had the twin goals of "labour control and the reinstatement of 'law and order'."

That is not to say that racism was unimportant. In fact, racism against Black people, immigrants and indigenous people runs through each chapter. The bosses organising against strikers in mines, the cigar industry, streetcars or wherever, used racism as a tactic to divide and rule, as well as being an ideological that they subscribed personally too. Racism was also, clearly a motivating factor for the individuals in groups like the KKK or other organisations discussed by Pearson.

But Pearson argues that class is the crucial tool for understanding these groups and the conflicts they engaged in. The violence used by the elite classes against workers, and the organisations they created to do this, was part of the cementing of comradeship between the bosses and those who identified with them. It helped isolate workers (and their organisations) from other groups in society, such as middle class shop owners and newspaper editors. It also explains the overlap and support given by the regional and national state to the local bosses. Time and again Pearson describes how vigilantes are "let off" or exonerated by the legal system as judges and Presidential appointees identify not with law and order, but with their class interests. Indeed there was an understanding for some trade union activists that "Uncle Sam is against us", in other words - that the US state was their enemy as much as the bosses. The reality of such disputes was, as Pearson points out, that "some relatively moderate union leaders [were transformed] into rather confident quasi-revolutionaries".

Anti trade unionism overlapped very much with anti-socialism. The "elites" themselves developed their own ruling class ideology to justify and encourage their actions. Quite a lot of Pearson's work focuses on J. West Goodwin, an active figure in the setting up of Citizens Alliances where he drew on his own, violent, experiences in stopping strikes. These Alliances, often involving hundreds or thousands of ruling class figures, actively countered workers organisations. Justifying this saw their spokespersons emphasising the importance of the "open shop" - a workplace where workers were not compelled to join unions. In Colorado, the Citizens' Alliance declared "The 'open shop' is the foundation of this organisation". Another Alliance activist in St Louis declared the closed shop "the worst curse that ever befell this country", worse than "wars, pestilence, cyclones, floods, earthquakes, fires" and so on. 

A core ideology of the capitalist system is the illusion that workers' are competing on a level playing field in the labour market. When workers' organise to build a trade union, it challenges the fundamentals of how the system works. So for capitalists like Goodwin, the vocal opposition to the closed shop was linked to their belief in a system that would be free to maximise their profits. The close association in the bosses minds' between a system free from workers' organisation and their personal role was summed up by a motto of the Idaho Springs Citizens' Protective League: "They Who Furnish the Capital Should Conduct the Business. Law and Order First - Politics, Creeds and Unions Afterwards". However the problem for the bosses, as always, was that the capital came from workers' labour and workers' would organise to try and get a bigger share of the fruits of their work.

Why does this matter? In his epilogue, Pearson draws a clear line between Capital's Terrorists in the founding period of US capitalism and the Terrorist attack on the Capitol, in January 2021. At "minimum", "both sets of actors had political agendas that they believed could be achieved by using brute force". But also "it is a safe bet... that most of the terrorists in the Capitol, especially the business owners, opposed labor organisations with the same level of intensity". But as Pearson points out, there are limitations to this analysis. Nonetheless, the key thing is that the history of US capitalism is one that has legitimised vigilante violence against workers, the left and the Black community.

Readers like myself who found themselves surprised by the overt violence used against trade unions as described in Pearson's book, will have a better understanding of the centrality of violence to the US political system itself. In this regard alone, Chad E. Pearson's Capital's Terrorists is a tremendous contribution. But there is one further point. The reader will emerge better equipped to understand the threat that US workers' faced to their organising in the past and today. In an era when we are often told that American workers are part of the problem, reminding ourselves of the brave struggles and appalling sacrifices that they have made in the past is both inspiring and important.

Related Reviews

Lause - The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots & Class Conflicts in the American West
Corbin - Gun Thugs, Rednecks & Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars

Cronon - Changes in the Land

Cronon - Nature's Metropolis

Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties

Jason Hickel - Less is More: How Degrowth will save the World

Jason Hickel's latest book opens with a devastating summary of the ecological crisis. But despite this, he argues that Less is More is "not a book about doom. It is a book about hope." It is also a book that attempts to go far beyond the mainstream responses to climate crisis which focus on new technologies or neoliberal economics. He concludes that "we" need to cut emissions to "zero much, much faster than anyone is presently planning". The reason that nothing has happened so far goes far beyond the superficial causes of the crisis:

Fossil fuel companies, and the politicians that they have bought, bear significant responsibility for our predicament. But this alone doesn't explain our failure to act. There's something else - something deeper. Our addiction to fossil fuels, and the antics of the fossil fuel industry, is really just a symptom of a prior problem. What's ultimately at stake is the economic system that has come to dominate more or less the entire planet over the past few centuries: capitalism.

More specifically, Hickel argues that it is the growth imperative to capitalism that is the problem, "it's not our technology that's the problem. It's growth".

Hickel's focus in this book on capitalism feels like a breath of fresh air. Early chapters in the book take a look at how capitalism developed and the dynamics of the system itself which create growth. Marxists like myself might find some nuances to argue with here, but that's not the key thing. What is important is that Hickel is discussing capitalism and critiquing its central dynamic. 

Hickel continues, however by arguing that he isn't saying that "growth is bad, in and of itself." Rather, he argues, the problem is "growthism" by which he means the "pursuit of growth for its own sake". Here I do have some important disagreements, because on occasion I think that Hickel comes close to arguing that growth is a choice made by the capitalists. He says for instance that "all sectors of the economy must grow, regardless of whether or not we actually need them to. This is an irrational way to manage an economy". 

But growthism, to use Hickel's word, isn't a managerial choice made by the owners of capital. It is a compulsion. They are compelled to do this because of the competitive nature of the system. It is a system of "competitive compulsion" after all. The capitalists cannot break free of this. 

In a recent piece on another book on Degrowth I wrote that:

Karl Marx said this compulsion flowed from competitive accumulation. Capitalists compete with each other to maximise their profits, and are forced to plough back into production most of the wealth they extract from workers. The compulsion to accumulate arises from the competition faced by capitalists. Unless they constantly innovate and develop production methods, they face losing out to their competitors—resulting in possible bankruptcy.

Now to be fair to Hickel, a great strength of his work is that he draws on the insights of Marx and similar writers to develop his arguments. Indeed he probably wouldn't greatly disagree with what I write above. I make this point not to imply that I am a better reader of Marx or for sectarian reasons, but because I think that the importance of understanding the inherent compulsion for "growth" within the system is key to understanding how we can get to a sustainable society.

Firstly, what do we mean by such a society? Hickel outlines the urgency well: "We have built up a global fossil-fuel infrastructure over the past 250 years, and now we have to completely overhaul it in over thirty". Hickel is not arguing here for austerity politics whereby everyone has to tighten their belts In fact Hickel is in favour of growth in some parts of the economy to ensure that people's needs are met equitably. He is arguing for degrowth in large sectors of the economy in a way that challenges the dominant functioning of our system. One example might be how much we work:

Researchers have found that if the United States were to reduce its working hours to the levels of Western Europe, its energy consumption would decline by a staggering 20%. Shortening the working week is one of the most immediately impactful climate policies available to us.

Here Hickel is certainly not arguing that workers should loose a fifth of their incomes. He is very much in favour of defending wages and improving them. Rather he is highlighting how wasteful our system of production is. Another example is a direct challenge to the colonial system that has impoverished and underdeveloped the Global South. Hickel writes:

It means... investing in robust universal social policy to guarantee healthcare, education, water, housing, social security. It means land reform so that small farmers have access to the resources that they need to thrive. It means using tariffs and subsidies to protect and encourage domestic industries. It means decent wages, labour las and a progressive distribution of national income. And it means building economies that are organised around renewable energy and ecological regeneration rather than around fossil fuels and extractivism.

Hickel argues that the capitalism is marked by "artificial scarcity". His argument is that this drove the development of capitalism, because shortages of land caused by enclosure forced people to take up wage labour to survive. Today he says, scarcity of jobs, resources, public services, time, creates a dynamic that forces people to engage with the system to survive. 

In a growth system, he says, "the objective is not to satisfy human needs, but to avoid satisfying human needs. It is irrational and ecologically violent... Once we grasp how this works, solutions rush into view... liberated from the pressures of artificial scarcity, and with basic needs met, the compulsion for people to compete for ever-increasing productivity would wither away. The economy would produce less as a result, yes - but it would also need less".

Capitalism is a system that produces scarcity at the same time as producing over-abundance. The crises of over-production that see vast amounts of commodities produced for profit, despite not being needed, are a direct result of the compulsion to growth. But scrapping this system will not come from simply wishing it away. It is fine to say, as Hickel does, that "by decommodifying public goods, expanding the commons, shortening the working week and reducing inequality we can enable people to access the goods that they need to live well without requiring additional growth in order to do so". But what is the mechanism.

Hickel argues that democracy is key. He wants to see democracy expanded arguing that democracy is inherently anti-capitalist. But as he also points out, capitalism is inherently anti-democracy. Herein lies the crux of the limitation of Hickel's transformative vision. Unless we come up with a strategy to break capitalism, capitalism will constantly use its own power to smash us.

In my recent book Socialism or Extinction I described various historical revolutions in order to reclaim the idea of revolution as a mass democratic movement from below. I also wrote at length about events in Chile in 1973 when Salvador Allende's mildly reforming government was broken by a vicious military coup led by Pinochet and supported by the United States. The importance of that lesson was not that reforms weren't important. But that without a social movement capable of disarming the capitalist state, such radical reforms are doomed to defeat. And, as Hickel acknowledges, we are not arguing here for minor changes but for a direct challenge to the nature of capitalism itself.

As such I was left disappointed by the end of Hickel's book. His demonstration of the failure of capitalism and his argument for a different way of running society seemed to be less a call for systemic change and instead a call to try and create a different system from within capitalism. In contrast I would argue that we have fight for the greatest possible reforms in the immediacy to minimise ecological destruction and offer social justice, at the same time as recognising that an economic system without the compulsion to growth will be one based on a different economic order. That requires revolutionary politics.

Much of this review has focused on my disagreement with Hickel's conclusion. That perhaps arises out of his framework, which differs from mine. But having said all this, I want to argue that his book, like that of Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter and Aaron Vansintjan is one that Marxists should engage with. There is much we agree on here, and Hickel's eloquence and passion, as well as his anti-capitalism, remain important within our shared environmental movement.

Related Reviews

Foster - Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution
Saito - Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
Schmelzer, Vetter & Vansintjan - The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism

John Bellamy Foster - Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution

Over the last quarter of a century, John Bellamy Foster's work on ecological Marxism has been hugely influential on the international left. His book Marx's Ecology, published in 2000, was incredibly timely. Coming as the world was increasingly aware of the environmental crises that people faced and offering new insights into how Marx and Marxists have understood nature and the way human society changes the world that we are part of.

As editor of the US socialist magazine Monthly Review Foster continues a prodigious output of articles that grapple with many different topics, but his work on the environment and ecology continues to develop. This new book brings together and updates many of Foster's articles from various different sources, with a particular focus on the way that capitalism transforms nature. Even those who regularly read Foster's articles in Monthly Review will find new material here as it includes articles from a wide variety of popular and academic journals and all of them have been brought up to date.

Foster's argument can be summed up with quote from the introduction where he explains the peculiar relationship that capitalism has to nature. Quoting Karl Marx, Foster writes:

Nature in this system is viewed simply as a 'free gift' to capital, while the vast majority of human beings are treated as an exploitable and expendable mass from which to generate surplus for the wealthy owners. The result is a system that knows no bounds, is oblivious to genuinely human needs, and is inherently unsustainable - now confronting its absolute limits in the Anthropocene.

Many of the chapters explore how exactly this process takes place. Foster looks at the growth imperative within capitalism, that drives accumulation and systematically degrades nature. He engages with contemporary debates about how this system can be challenged, including the degrowth movement. He notes, for instance, while discussing Naomi Klein's work that many critics of the left willingly confuse matters by arguing that degrowth is similar to "the austerity policies associated with neoliberalism" rather than a transformative project that fights for an economy based on "rational use of resources under conditions of absolute necessity and the promotion of equality and community".

As most of these chapters first appeared as articles over a number of years the reader will not a development of Foster's arguments through the book. This is frequently in response to evolving social movements. Foster notes, for instance, that "main thrust" of the environmental movement has changed. shifting "from demand-side initiatives aimed at reducing consumer-market demand for carbon fuels to supply-side strategies aimed at corporations and designed to keep fossil fuels in the ground".

Some chapters however explore more theoretical debates. A number of these are more challenging, and require careful reading. There's an interesting chapter on "the theory of unequal ecological exchange" which explores how Howard Odum's ideas of "emergy" might be synthesised with Marx's own dialectical understanding of society and nature to produce a clearer understanding of how the inequalities of global capitalism had led to an "unequal ecological exchange between center and periphery". There are some useful concepts here, but Foster cautions us that "learning from such a systems ecology approach is one thing; falling prey to the reductionism to which it can potentially lead is another. In any Marxian analysis, ecological materialism must take theoretical precedence over energetics".

Other articles deal with Engels and dialectics and several are defences of Foster works from his critics, particular those on the left who critique the "metabolic rift" theory that Foster develops from Marx's work. I have discussed some of this elsewhere and won't revisit that in this review. Instead I want to finish with a look at Foster's discussion of the struggle for a sustainable world.

What sort of society might this be? Foster argues that a sustainable society is one where there is a rational organisation of the interaction, the metabolism between society and nature. This would be a society organised by the "associated producers" whose aim would be to pass on the world to succeeding generations. This, he notes, contrasts with reformist strategies - even radical ones - where there is no fundamental transformation in economic organisation. For instance,

rather than dealing with the unemployment problem directly - through a radical program that would give people jobs aimed at he creation of genuine use values in ways compatible with a more sustainable society - degrowth theorists prefer to emphasize sorter working hours.

But, he continues, "it is hard to see the viability of shorter work hours and basic income guarantees on the scale suggested other than as elements in a transition to a post-capitalist (indeed socialist) society."

In fact one of the themes that runs though Foster work in this collection is a sense of urgency at the need for fundamental social transformation in the face of ecological collapse. As such, Foster argues that radical demands can only be successful as part of a wider struggle for systemic change. How does Foster envision social transformation? He writes:

Here it is important to recognize that an ecological and social revolution under present historical conditions is likely to pass through two stages that we can call ecodemocratic and ecosocialist. The self-mobilisation of the population will initially take an ecodemocratic form, emphasizing the building of energy alternatives combined with just transition, but in a context generally lacking any systematic critique of production or consumption. Eventually, the pressure of climate change and the struggle for social and ecological justice, spurred on by the mobilisation of diverse communities, can be expected to lead to a more comprehensive ecorevolutionary view, penetrating the veil of the received ideology. 

It is not immediately clear to me whether Foster's description here is intended to refer to the period after workers' have won state power and overthrown capitalism, or if it is intended to mean the whole period of revolutionary transition. A few paragraphs later he says, "The path toward ecological and social freedom requires abandoning a mode of production rooted in the exploitation of human labour and the expropriation of nature and peoples." In this case, we must understand Foster's earlier vision as being post-revolution, in the sense of taking place after the defeat of capitalism yet while the earlier social and economic relations continue to exist. 

Foster explains that "in general we can expect the Global South to be the site of the most rapid growth of an environmental proletariat, arising from the degradation of material conditions of the population in ways hat are equally ecological and economic". 

As I have written previously I am wary of the phrase "environmental proletariat" as it might be interpreted as downplaying the historical role of the working class as producers of surplus value under capitalism. But I am not sure that Foster means it quite in this sense, as he explains the term as referring to a "broad mass" of the population who gain awareness of the environmental threat leading them to revolutionary action. Having said that I do think Marxists need to insist on the centrality of the working class to revolutionary struggle. They are a class defined by their lack of ownership of the means of production and their need to sell their labour power. The working class is the class upon whom capitalist society depends, who have the power to stop the capitalist economy and through their revolutionary organisation build a socialist society. 

Of course their position in society will not lead workers directly to an ecological consciousness, but this is why campaigns by environmentalists remain so important - as they can bring ecological issues into the working class movement. On a small scale the presence of environmental activists, often encouraged by socialists, on picket lines in the current mini-strike wave in Britain, is a good example of this process. In this sense Foster's term "environmental proletariat" is a helpful concept. 

As with all of his work, John Bellamy Foster's Capitalism in the Anthropocene is enormously stimulating. The book covers many different subjects and readers will find much to grapple with. Foster's theoretical work has been crucial to a new generation of activists, socialists and Marxists trying to get to grips with the multifaceted capitalist crisis we all face. The strength of Foster's work is that it gives a clear theoretical base to the revolutionary struggles that we are engaged in. As such this, and Foster's earlier books, are a crucial tool for the fight for socialism.

Related Reviews

Foster - The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology
Foster & Burkett - Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique
Foster - Ecology Against Capitalism
Foster – The Vulnerable Planet; A Short Economic History of the Environment
Foster - Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature
Foster - The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet